TED speaker Hyeonseo Lee (right) meets Dick Stolp (left), the stranger who gave her a significant amount of cash to help get her family out of jail four years ago. Photo: SBS

Hyeonseo Lee’s story is a tale bound to pull at your heartstrings. She’s a North Korean refugee — and while helping her family flee the country in 2009, Lee’s mother and brother were detained in a Laos prison.
Hyeonseo Lee: My escape from North Korea
At TED2013, Lee described how it was an enormously generous gift from a stranger that helped her family to safety.

This week’s TED Weekends on the Huffington Post takes a look at this moving story and considers the latest twist in the tale. After Lee’s TED Talk was posted, a television station tracked down the stranger she spoke of and reunited the two on air.

Below, find three essays from TED Weekends, thinking more about Lee, North Korea and personal kindness in the face of desperation. It’s a reminder to us all to see individual stories amongst wider political issues.

A total stranger helped Hyeonseo Lee pay her mother and brother’s way out of jail as they fled North Korea. Now, four years later, Lee has been reunited with that stranger, getting the chance to thank him in person.

In Lee’s heart-wrenching TED2013 talk, “My escape from North Korea,” she describes defecting from North Korea in the late ’90s. But as she describes in the second half of her talk, after years of hiding she returned to China to help her family make their own escape. When her mother and brother were captured in Vientiane, Laos, and jailed for illegal border crossing, Lee describes how, out of money and desperate for a solution, she was approached by a foreigner. After hearing Lee’s story, this stranger withdrew a large sum of cash — £645 to be exact — from an ATM. With the money to use as a bribe, Lee’s family was able to escape. Read the full essay »

I was nearly at the end of a presentation on the North Korean prison camp system, when the last person in the audience grasped the microphone to ask a question. His question was so unexpected that I was literally blindsided.

Up to that point, I’d already described the conditions inside North Korea’s prison camps as “odious” and “systematic,” which qualified them as a crime against humanity. I’d already talked about the nearly complete absence of civil society inside North Korea, which distinguishes the country from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union during the Communist era. I’d already mentioned my own frustrations about strategies to address the country’s human rights violations and concluded by supporting both name-and-shame efforts and governmental engagement with Pyongyang as a precondition to improving the lives of all North Koreans, including (one day) those in the prison camps.

I’d already answered half a dozen questions. But this last question threw me for a loop. Read the full essay »

The most poignant part of Hyeonseo Lee’s TED Talk was her mention of the Good Samaritan who assisted with the release of her family from a prison in Laos. Many of us would like to see ourselves as this man. We hear the harrowing tales of North Korean refugees and we want to help. Yet our ability to comprehend the dynamics in the Korean peninsula is limited by the fact that we are half a world away.

Motivated by this spirit of curiosity, I took a 15-hour flight from Dallas to Seoul earlier this month. After spending five nights in Seoul and a day touring the DMZ, my major takeaway is that North Korea is an impenetrable fortress that everyone wants to look at, but no one cares to touch. Pyongyang has alienated most of the global community with its focus on military supremacy, at the expense of the lives of it citizens. Read the full essay »

TED speaker Hyeonseo Lee (right) meets Dick Stolp (left), the kind stranger who gave her a wad of cash to help get her family out of jail four years ago. Photo: SBS

A total stranger helped Hyeonseo Lee pay her mother and brother’s way out of jail as they fled from North Korea. Now, four years later, Lee has been reunited with that stranger, getting the chance to thank him in person.

Hyeonseo Lee: My escape from North Korea
In Lee’s TED2013 talk, “My escape from North Korea,” she describes defecting from North Korea in the late ’90s and how, after nearly ten years of living in hiding, she returned to help her family make their own escape. When her mother and brother were captured in Vientiane, Laos, and jailed for illegal border crossing, Lee describes how, out of money and desperate for a solution, she was approached by a foreigner. After hearing Lee’s story, this stranger withdrew a large sum of cash — £645 to be exact — from an ATM. With the money to use as a bribe, Lee’s family was able to escape.

When Lee asked the stranger why he was helping her, he replied, “I’m not helping you. I’m helping the North Korean people.” As Lee says in an emotional moment in her talk, “The kind stranger symbolized new hope for me and the North Korean people when we needed it most.”

Earlier this month Lee was invited to be a guest on the Australian broadcast show Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), where she had an unexpected visitor: Dick Stolp, the Australian backpacker who had helped her in Laos. Lee didn’t have any of his contact information – but Stolp had seen her TED Talk and SBS, catching wind of the story, orchestrated the surprise reunion.

“I was really happy … I can’t explain with words, but it was really amazing,” Hyeonseo told Sky News after the reunion. “He says, ‘I’m not a hero,’ but I say he is a modern hero.”

Stolp, for his part, was excited to see the girl he had helped years ago. “You help a small hand and it reaches to other hands and you think, ‘That’s great, that’s good stuff,’” he said. “I’m meeting someone who is now doing good things, and inside I can’t help but feel ‘Hey! I helped this lady to go out and change her life.’”

]]>http://blog.ted.com/north-korean-defector-hyeonseo-lee-reunited-with-the-man-who-saved-her-family/feed/10Hyeonseo-Lee-meets-man-who-saved-her-familythuhaHyeonseo-Lee-meets-man-who-saved-her-familyYour weekend reading: The wrong kind of Caucasian, the graduate school question, and how the Internet ruined everythinghttp://blog.ted.com/your-weekend-reading-the-wrong-kind-of-caucasian-how-the-internet-ruined-everything/
http://blog.ted.com/your-weekend-reading-the-wrong-kind-of-caucasian-how-the-internet-ruined-everything/#commentsFri, 26 Apr 2013 22:41:01 +0000http://blog.ted.com/?p=75170[…]]]>A weekly round-up of interesting, weird and useful reads from around the interwebs.

In “The wrong kind of Caucasian,” Sarah Kendzior critiques the media for its tendency to demonize an entire country based on the violent acts of a few individuals. [Al Jazeera]

“The Internet: A Warning from History,” or how the Internet ruined everything. Just watch it. [The Poke]

An independent company hopes to support Kickstarter’s mission by aggregating all the T-shirts listed in Kickstarter rewards, turning the site into a shirt shop. A weekend hack by web company P’unk Avenue. [Kick shirts]

UCLA professor Peter Nonacs taught his students game theory by letting them cheat on an exam. [Pop Sci]

Kim Hyun-hui was a North Korean spy who blew up a South Korean airliner with an accomplice in 1987, killing 115 people. She gives a rare interview. [BBC] For a very different escape from North Korea, watch Hyeonseo Lee’s talk from TED2013 »

Finally, let Harvard guess your age based on a series of red dots. [Huffington Post]

Hyeonseo Lee saw her first public execution at age 7. A child growing up in North Korea, the moment affected her, but she didn’t have the frame of reference to understand the government repression going on around her.

“When I was little, I thought my country was the best on the planet,” she says in Session 10 of TED2012. “I was very proud … I often wondered about the outside world, but I thought I would spend my life in North Korea.”

In the 1990s, a famine struck North Korea, killing an estimated million people. And while Lee’s family was able to eat, in 1995, her mom brought home a girl. With the girl was a letter that read, “When you read this, our family members will not exist in this world because we have not eaten.”

“I was so shocked,” says Lee. “This was the first time that I heard people in my country were suffering.”

She began to hear of people surviving by eating grass and tree bark. While she lived only across a river from the Chinese border — close enough to see their lights, and wonder why her side was so dark — the bodies floating in the river of drowned escapees was enough to deter escape.

Lee can’t share a lot of details of how she left North Korea — she can only say that at some point, she was sent to stay with distant relatives. She thought she’d see her immediate family again soon. That wouldn’t happen for another 14 years.

Lee lived in China, essentially on her own, posing as if she were Chinese so that she wouldn’t be sent back to North Korea.

“One day, my worst nightmare came true,” says Lee. She was caught by the Chinese police. Someone had accused her of being North Korean, and she was subjected to brutal tests of her ability to speak Chinese. “I was so scared, I thought my heart would explode.”

Luckily, she passed the test and felt a surge of relief when the officers said: “She isn’t North Korean.”

“Every year, countless North Koreans are caught in China, sent back, tortured, imprisoned, publicly executed … It was a miracle,” says Lee. “It’s tragic that North Koreans have to hide their identity just to survive. Even after getting out, their whole world can be turned upside down.”

Ten years later, Lee started life over again in South Korea, learning a new culture and going to university. But soon, she received another panic in the form of a telephone call. North Korean officials had intercepted money sent to her family. She needed to help them escape, and quick.

On the stage, Lee narrates the incredible journey to get her family out. When they were caught by Chinese police, Lee managed to convince them that her family was “these deaf and dumb people that I am shepherding.” It worked, and Lee’s family made it through China and into southeast Asia. But then they were arrested for border crossing.

“This was one of the lowest points in my life,” says Lee. “I did everything to help my family to get to freedom and we came so close. But they were thrown in jail just a short distance from the South Korean embassy.”

It was the kindess of a stranger that saved them. A random man asked Lee what was wrong. He took her to an ATM and gave her money to pay her family’s way out of jail. When she asked him why, he said: “I’m not helping you, I’m helping North Korean people.”

Lee’s story is powerful and a good reminder that getting to freedom is only half the battle.

]]>http://blog.ted.com/escape-from-north-korea-hyeonseo-lee-at-ted2013/feed/2TED2013_0065891_D41_3382katetedPhoto: James Duncan DavidsonTED2013_0065604_DSC_8972Secret Voices: Speakers in Session 10 at TED2013http://blog.ted.com/secret-voices-speakers-in-session-10-at-ted2013/
http://blog.ted.com/secret-voices-speakers-in-session-10-at-ted2013/#commentsThu, 28 Feb 2013 22:30:17 +0000http://blog.ted.com/?p=69829[…]]]>Shhh … it’s time for Secret Voices, the 10th session of TED2013. Get ready to hear stories of the forgotten, marginalized, stigmatized and hidden. Our first speaker will make quite an entrance while the last will give a stirring finish, in spoken word. In between, thoughts on interspecies communication.

Here, the speakers who appeared in this session. Click on their name to read a recap:

Diana Reiss studies cognition in animals and the evolution of intelligence. She and her colleagues demonstrated that bottlenose dolphins (and Asian elephants) can recognize themselves in the mirror.

Musician Peter Gabriel is the co-founder of WITNESS, which distributes digital cameras to empower people to document human-rights abuses. A founder of the band Genesis, Gabriel is now a solo artist and record mogul, championing world music and innovation.

As Director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, Neil Gershenfeld explores the boundaries between the digital and physical worlds.

Computer scientist Vint Cerf helped lay the foundations for the internet as we know it.

Beijing-based artist Liu Bolin silently comments on modern sociopolitical conditions by dissolving into his art.